Technology

Eternals is Marvel’s biggest swing in years. It’s an attempt at a prestige-style film directed by Chloé Zhao, fresh off her Oscar win, at a size and scale that none of Marvel’s previous films have tried. But despite its grand ambitions, the film gets lost in its ponderous ideas and caught in the constraining box of what an MCU film has to be. Eternals aspires to an almost biblical scope. The opening crawl of the film (yes, there is an opening crawl) reads like an early page of the Book of Genesis, explaining who Arishem, the Prime Celestial, brought light to the universe. The film bounds across thousands of years of human history, has no less than 10 main characters, four villains, a love quadrangle, and even Marvel’s first on-screen sex scene. Eternals has a galactic scale, to mixed effec...

It can be difficult to figure out what to do when you’re asked to provide a hard copy of a document but don’t have access to a printer at home. While it used to be a safe bet that everyone had a printer at home, that’s no longer the case — but if you don’t have one, odds are that at some point, you’ll come across someone who hasn’t gotten the memo and insists on a hard copy. If you’ve found yourself in this situation, you’ve got options. To help, I’ve researched the various methods you can use to get a document from your computer to whoever needs it and have come up with a few tips and considerations for printing without your own printer. Before I get to that, though, you’ll have to… Prepare to print Presumably, the file you want to print is on a computer, and you need some way to ge...

The latest autonomous vehicle company to tackle the mean streets of New York City will be Waymo. The Google spinoff is bringing a handful of cars to the Big Apple, where they will start mapping the city streets using manually driven vehicles with two people riding inside. Waymo cited New York’s vibrant street life, “unusual road geometries” (which is a nice way of saying utterly confusing), and the likelihood of heavy rain and snow as being among the reasons the company is eager to test there. Presumedly the company is also curious to see how its vehicles will react when down-on-their-luck street hustlers slap their hoods and shout “I’m walking here!” Waymo won’t have more than five vehicles on the street at a time to start out, a spokesperson said. They will be driving in Manhattan, prima...

Live Nation has officially revealed plans to debut its set digital ticket stubs as NFTs. NME reports that these digital items are named Live Stubs and are expected to be minted in collaboration with the artists and the tickets sold for their show. Each Live Stub NFT will correspond to the section, row, and seat of the physical ticket and is included free with each ticket purchased for a Live Nation tour in North America. To clarify, the NFTs do not replace the physical ticket for entry to the concerts. The digital tickets merely act as a collector item for fans to share, trade, or resell on Live Nation’s website. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said, “Our Live Stubs product brings back the nostalgia of collecting ticket stubs while also giving artists a new tool to deepen that relationship ...

Now that the new Apple MacBook Pro has hit the market, officials from the tech giant explain why the M1 Max Chip-packed laptop doesn’t have things like a touchscreen or Face ID. Touchscreens are widely available in Windows computers, but Apple has yet to include this tech into its Macbook. “We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad. It’s totally optimized for that, and the Mac is totally optimized for indirect input. We haven’t really felt a reason to change that.” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. Another function is its signature, Face ID, replacing the Touch ID for safety reasons. Apple’s Vice President of Mac and iPad Product Marketing, Tom Boger, provided an answer on this: “your hands are already on the keyboard when using a MacBook Pro...

With social distancing regulations slowly relaxing and working arrangements gradually moving back into the office, Razer has now updated its Productivity range to give you that premium clicking and typing feedback without disturbing your neighboring colleagues with the signature loud clacks of mechanical switches. Now coming with what Razer calls “silent mechanical switches” are two new additions to its work-minded series: the Pro Click Mini and the Pro Type Ultra. Both retaining the same practical white and grey color tones, the former is rated for up to 15 million clicks and offers either 465 hours of battery life via Razer’s HyperSpeed Wireless connection or 725 hours through Bluetooth. If you’re used to something lighter, the mouse can also run on just one AA battery instead of the ful...

After adopting Bitcoin as a legal currency back in September, El Salvador will now be building numerous new schools using the profits it has made from the cryptocurrency. According to reports, the Central American country has now decided to reinvest some of its Bitcoin earnings back into its community by building 20 new schools using $2 million USD. “When the project was launched the FIDEBITCOIN fund did not have the same amount of surplus it has today,” remarked El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele during the opening of a pet hospital which was also constructed using Bitcoin profits. “This is what helped us decide to move forward with the approval of building the first 20 Bitcoin schools. After being launched by Bukele himself, the FIDEBITCOIN trust account now holds roughly $150 million ...

Today we learned more about Theranos’ kink for corporate cosplay. The company liked to dress up its own reports in pharmaceutical companies’ logos, to use the present tense when the future tense would be more appropriate, and to reiterate its favorite buzzwords in PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide. Elizabeth Holmes’ lawyers, in defending her against the wire fraud charges that the government has brought, resumed cross-examination of Lisa Peterson, who worked for the DeVos family offices and was involved in approving their investment in the company. (Family offices are a rich people thing — an investment arm for all that sweet, sweet money.) The defense tried to discredit Peterson’s testimony from last week about a key Pfizer memo, which she said was key to thinking the company was on...

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it would be shutting down its Face Recognition system and will no longer automatically identify people in photos and videos. “We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules,” said Jerome Pesenti, Facebook’s VP of artificial intelligence. Facebook says that more than a third of its daily active users have opted in to the Face Recognition setting. As part of the change, more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates will be deleted from the company’s data systems. The social network said that there were many practical applications for this system, including its automatic alt text system, which helps describe images of friend...

During Activision Blizzard’s third-quarter earnings call, the publisher announced that Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 will now launch later than expected. “As we have worked with new leadership in Blizzard and within the franchises themselves, particularly in certain key creative roles, it has become apparent that some of the Blizzard content planned for next year will benefit from more development time to reach its full potential,” a Blizzard executive said during the call. Activision Blizzard mentioned “higher voluntary turnover” and “the departure of a number of individuals across the company” as factors contributing to this new delay. Blizzard Entertainment suffered a large number of firings and high-profile departures, including Diablo IV game director Luis Barriga, after news broke of the...

During Activision Blizzard’s third-quarter earnings call, the publisher announced that Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 will now launch later than expected. “As we have worked with new leadership in Blizzard and within the franchises themselves, particularly in certain key creative roles, it has become apparent that some of the Blizzard content planned for next year will benefit from more development time to reach its full potential,” a Blizzard executive said during the call. Activision Blizzard mentioned “higher voluntary turnover” and “the departure of a number of individuals across the company” as factors contributing to this new delay. Blizzard Entertainment suffered a large number of firings and high-profile departures, including Diablo IV game director Luis Barriga, after news broke of the...

Zillow has announced that it’s winding down the Zillows Offers program, a day after reports surfaced that it’s selling over 7,000 of the houses it purchased with the intent of flipping them to would-be home buyers. In a press release announcing its Q3 results, the company says that Zillow Offers only served “a small portion” of its customers. CEO Rich Barton now says that “We’ve determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated and continuing to scale Zillow Offers would result in too much earnings and balance-sheet volatility.” With the program shutting down, the company says it’s reducing the estimated value of the houses it’s purchased in Q3 or will purchase in Q4 by more than $500 million. Zillow also says that winding down the business in the c...